1 Dress, 365 Days

Sheena Matheiken, an Indian-American, youngish, Brooklyn type has all the great fashion options in her adopted city of New York. Yet this altruistic young lady opted to forgo these trendy mainstays and wear the same little black dress (albeit, she had 7 identical copies of the dress for each day of the week) for 365 Days (from April of 2009-April 2010) in an effort to call attention to the plight of schoolchildren in her native India and make a host of points about our obsessions with material things, sustainability and creativity/fashion. Sheena accessorized and styled her way into 365 different outfits successfully and documented the whole thing, calling it The Uniform Project and and blogging about it.

Soon, the media caught onto her clever plan and Matheiken received tons of press about her true cause, the Akanksha Foundation , an organization that is revolutionizing Indian education. They provide funding for children’s school uniforms and other educational expenses. Matheiken recalls wearing a daily uniform during her own school days there and how every child would manage to style theirs a bit differently, hence the inspiration for the blog. The dress itself was designed especially for her needs in minds, being a basic, black seasonless piece in cotton, fit for any time of year or occassion. If you’d like to make a donation to the Akanksha Foundation or learn more about this cause (or if you just want to purchase the dress Matheiken wore everyday and get some sartorial inspiration), click here. So far, $103,389, or 287 Indian children, have attended school well-equipped as a result!